McDonald’s Claims ‘Compromised’ Twitter Account Slammed Trump

On Thursday (March 16) a tweet from the verified Twitter account of McDonald’s relayed a controversial message to President Donald Trump.

Moments after the tweet was posted and pinned to the top of the account page, McDonald’s removed the message and confirmed its account was “compromised.” It remains unclear if that means a hacker gained access to the account or if the message was sent by an employee, CNNTech reported.

The tweet, which has been removed, said: “@realDonaldTrump You are actually a disgusting excuse of a President and we would love to have @BarackObama back, also you have tiny hands.”

Roughly an hour later, McDonald’s tweeted: “Twitter notified us that our account was compromised. We deleted the tweet, secured our account and are now investigating this.”

McDonald’s spokeswoman Becca Hary confirmed the tweet’s validity with CNNTech and provided a similar statement via email to the media outlet.

According to CNNTech, several other high-profile Twitter accounts were also hacked into on Wednesday (March 15), including Amnesty International, Forbes and the Atlanta Police Department.

Last year, Twitter was forced to lock millions of user accounts due to a password leak. According to LeakedSource, which indexes hacked credentials from data breaches, the credentials were being traded on the Dark Web for about 10 bitcoin a pop, or a little under $6,000.

It was reported at the time that the login credentials of more than 32 million Twitter users were compromised. In response to the leak, Twitter quickly initiated forced resets for many of its users.

Twitter remained adamant that its systems were not breached.

“The purported Twitter @names and passwords may have been amassed from combining information from other recent breaches, malware on victims’ machines that are stealing passwords for all sites or a combination of both,” Michael Coates, trust and information security officer for Twitter, wrote in a blog post at the time.